The two poles of Jerusalem: the Old Yishuv and Rav Kook

By the beginning of the twentieth century there were two Jewries in Jerusalem, and they fitted together badly.

The Old Yishuv—the communities that had lived here long before the Zionist movement: to study and pray by these walls, and to live on the diaspora's donations, the chalukah. That arrangement is often abused as dependency; in fact it meant that the community existed for study and not for husbandry, and it was deliberately kept so, for centuries.

The New Yishuv—the settlements that came with the First and Second Aliyah: land, labour, their own schools, their own institutions, and largely secular men at their head.

The question was simple: who speaks for the Jewry of Jerusalem before the authorities—Ottoman first, then British. And behind it stood an incomparably larger question: may the return of a people be arranged by the hands of men for whom the Torah is not law.

Two men answered, and both weighed.

Rav Abraham Isaac ha-Kohen Kook saw in secular Zionism a hidden holiness: men build and do not know what they serve—and the task is not to cut them off but to join the parted parts of the people. Out of this grew the whole line of religious Zionism.

Rav Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld answered otherwise, and firmly in his own way: a movement that rejects the Torah cannot be acknowledged as the beginning of redemption, and a community cannot be represented by those who do not keep its law. In 1918, when the general city council came under Zionist influence, he founded with Rabbi Yitzchok Yerucham Diskin the Edah HaChareidis—a separate community outside the common institutions.

What is worth remembering: five years before that, in 1913, they travelled together. A month on winter roads, by stagecoach, train, boat, horse and donkey, to more than twenty settlements—Zichron Yaakov, Merhavia, Degania, Kinneret, Tiberias, Safed, Metula. They went for one thing: to strengthen observance among the settlers. And something came of it: teachers were stationed in the settlements, and a standing link with the rabbis was set up.

And then they parted. Sonnenfeld spoke of the Zionists harshly and banned Orot, Rav Kook's book. They did not lose their respect for each other, and that too belongs to the picture.

The argument is not settled. The Edah HaChareidis stands to this day; Rav Kook's line grew into religious Zionism. This reference work sets out both sides as they understood themselves, and passes no judgment.